Herald post on separate Maori prison units

Hallucigenia (In Wildness Is the Beauty of Earth)

If you’re lost between floors
and your wait is getting you down—
a fortnight of dying bored
in the here and now—
remember . . .

There is no private language.
When we speak in tongues
everyone understands,
the world will move.

Animals, birds and trees,
people who we love to please:
spell your name in numbers—
in wildness is the beauty of Earth.

Hallucigenia: do what you will.

If you’re between stations
on the road that’s bringing you home—
a lifetime spent alone
on the never-never—
remember . . .

There is . . . [etc.]

Key—A song about the number 14: a fortnight; the fourteenth floor (which is really the lonely thirteenth); the fourteen-legged hallucigenia; the stations of the cross; Jacob Boehme's notion (or numerological conceit) of the number 14 as representing the Spirit moving in nature; 14 as the number of David, the author of the Book of Numbers; the number of charity (caritas: grace)

Black Hands (Every Street)

—You have to take the extremes into account to reach the reality (thus, the Bains v. the Wittgensteins)

In Every Street
a “nervous splendour” —
oh, the drama
that plays out behind closed doors:
gunshots and bloodstains
no-one can see,
hidden lenses on the pain
of lost sons and mother-lovers.

Lost in the slow burn
of everyday things,
“how sad, how sad,”
he says to black hands.

“Sorry, you are the only one
who deserved to stay.”

In Every Street,
a “nervous splendour” —
hurts beaten down with
words unspoken,
mountains of linen and clothes:
targets in the dust and the dirt.

Lost in the slow burn
of everyday things,
“I saw him, I saw him”:
black hands are coming.

“Sorry, you are the only one
who deserved to stay.”

Blood seems to go everywhere.

[Cf. “The mask of sanity”: manie sans delire (Philippe Pinel [1801], a.k.a. J. C. Prichard’s “moral insanity” [1835] → psychopathy)]

You have to take the extremes into account to reach the reality: Maarten Kleintjes, the National Manager of the Police Electronic Crime Laboratory. It is the via externa or extrema—the outside/outward/strange/foreign or outermost path; Kleintjes continues: "the truth will lie somewhere in the middle" (via media)—not necessarily: there is some truth in excess.

a "nervous splendour": Alexander Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein. A Family at War (Doubleday, 2009).

black hands: the day before the murders, Bain was rehearsing in the chorus of a university production of Oedipus Rex; a scene of the tragedy is sometimes performed with actors wearing black gloves.

“how sad, how sad”: Wittgenstein on Georg Trakl’s death (9 June 1914); see Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius 119.

A Beautiful Thing Can Never Perfect Be (Before Sunrise)

Verse 1:
Oh, the fatal flaws in your skin;
the floor of the room we’re in . . .
we trace lines in our favourite place,
as we chase away the days.
Beautiful things we knew—and had
we known what was to come,
we would’ve lived like lovers
in a movie, crying out for more.

Prechorus:
But we live the only way we know—
yes, it will have to do . . .
One, two, three,
for you and me,
count the ways
a beautiful thing can go astray,
day dawn grey.

Chorus:
Before sunrise
everything was cool.
You were my eyes;
we knew no rules.
Thanks to you and me
a beautiful thing can never perfect be.

Studying Writing Studies

Current issues of the teaching flow:

Fractals: mapping a/one's characteristic sentence, i.e. grammar, onto essay structure as a pseudo-fractal. E.g. parataxis (juxtaposition): "Tell me, how are you?"

Essay structure understood rhetorically—on the model of hypo-/parataxis. E.g. anadiplosis as the model for linking markers at the beginning of new paragraph (gradatio is even better: "My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,/ And every tongue brings in a several tale,/ And every tale condemns me for a villain" [Richard III, 5.3.194]).

An ABC of syntax

Using children's language learning as the model for understanding academic writing: children improvise, then begin to learn the rules and exceptions through practice, then become over-vigorous in their application of the rules under the impetus of error correction: erratology [science of mistakes]. The same thing happens at University, if we rigorously impose an erratological academic grammar on students: grammar A ["academic"]). Of course, students often think such an approach is what is required to learn academic rigour. Through teaching, rather than obsessively correcting, grammar B ["bad"], we can recapture the improvisation and practice phases of language learning, and thereby liberate students from the aporia of erratology. Then they are freed into the possibilities of Grammar C ["crafty," thus the craft of grammar].

David Starkey (ed.), Genre by Example: Writing What We Teach (Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2001).
Winston Weathers, An Alternate Style: Options in Composition (Hayden, 1980).

To Side with Daedalus

Where exactly does the weight of this writing moment, or rather, moment writing, lie? (Not in the hand like a gold coin—like a weight on your eye.)

This is what I thought, watching my daughter playing, hearing my son counting, hoping it was my wife not my son scrabbling in the kitchen drawer, standing in the shower thinking, waiting to get out without forgetting what I just been thinking I might write in time to husband it into life.

Originally I wrote “significance”—or rather, spoke it sotto voce all’interno del cranio—but “weight” better captures the way the desire to write bears down upon you, as you wait for the moment to arrive.

It’s not so different a weight from the father weight.

Time is not money; money is time. The adage “money buys you time” is false: it allows you to avoid spending time doing something; it allows you to not have to wait for something. That you must spend time writing as you wait for it to arrive is a truth of writing—or rather, this is one way writing is true. But writing also lies because it erases the time you invested in it.

Fatherhood does not.

On the haka